


And Who Can Say if There Are no Frogs on the Moon

by tin_girl



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, because apparently Luna believes in moon frogs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2019-09-14
Packaged: 2020-11-02 05:08:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20631638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tin_girl/pseuds/tin_girl
Summary: Hermione keeps the copy of the Quibbler under her pillow and reads through it when she wakes from nightmares in which Bellatrix is still alive.





	And Who Can Say if There Are no Frogs on the Moon

You – only you – will have stars that can laugh.

~~Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

Sometimes Hermione dreams of standing at the entrance to the Ravenclaw tower, the eagle knocker telling her a riddle.

“You’re on a desert island,” it says. “Who do you take with you?”

Hermione thinks and thinks, and lists names, but the knocker only laughs. Hermione looks over her shoulder, but it’s too late for anyone to come help, and she hates herself for checking, anyway.

“I know!” she says, and by old instinct, almost raises her hand. Everything smells of school, and she's fifteen again, wants to tug at her skirt and bite the tip of a quill. “If I’m already on the island, it's too late to take anyone with me, isn't it?”

“But Hermione,” Luna says, coming up to stand next to her, hair tangled and feet bare. “You’re still here.”

Hermione hates losing, but she still prefers this dream to when she wakes up screaming.

“That’s not how riddles work, anyway,” she mumbles into her pillow, and doesn’t think of how for the entirety of Hermione’s fifth year, Luna didn’t have shoes. 

*

At Hogwarts, there are always essays to write, books to read, and Dark Lords to stop, but Hermione finds the time for opinions, anyway – in the shower or while chewing toast for breakfast, when she doesn't have to study.

Across the room, Luna is reading a magazine upside down, and Hermione raises her eyebrows. She barely has time to read anything the right side up.

“What does it matter?” Ron asks, tugging at her wrist before the hem of her sleeve can fall into a glass of milk.

“It doesn’t,” she says, snatching her hand away. “It’s just counterproductive, is all.”

She doesn’t tell him – has never told anyone, really – that what she most hates about Luna is how, if she knew about how Hermione had Pomfrey spell her teeth all that bit smaller than they used to be the year before, she wouldn’t understand why.

For a while, Hermione goes on disliking Luna, because she always has time for opinions but comparatively less of it for reconsidering them. It takes autumn biting into October like a feral wolf for Hermione to change her mind, everything outside red as she marches through first heaps of fallen leaves, someone having called her a Mudblood again and a rip in her stocking even though she’s been careful.

“Hermione,” Luna greets her, sprawled on the ground like something that fell off the sky. “Can you see that cloud over there, the one shaped like a smile?”

After, laid out next to her like they’re those stick figures cut out of paper and connected by hand, Hermione listens to Luna talk about unicorns and smells chestnuts, even though around them there are only oaks.

It’s not until she gets back to her dormitory that she considers it might have been Luna’s hair.

*

Between winter and spring, thinking of the dream, Hermione stops at a newspaper stand and reaches for a copy of the Quibbler. Once, it used to irritate her, all that talk of Nargles, Gulping Plimpies and Umgubular Slashkilters, but then the war came with its empty coffee tins and news of someone dying every other evening. How Hermione longed to open something then and find a small, winged creature no one’s seen before inside, how she longed to write Luna about it in code.

In the days after Voldemort, when she started remembering how it had all hurt, she would take ripped-out Quibbler pages out of her shoes, out of her pockets, out of her wallet, and read through them, too tired to be frustrated, barely strong enough to smile.

Last she knew – Neville telling her over coffee, garden gloves thrown off to the side – Luna was somewhere in Scotland, tracking a yet-undiscovered insect that fed on sadness of all things.

“Sadness and pain, I think she said,” Neville told her. “Didn’t you get a postcard?”

The unmentioned ‘everyone else did.’

“I wouldn’t call you an idiot if you wrote me about it,” Hermione says to the front page, slipping a few coins into the salesman’s pocket before he can suggest grabbing the Prophet instead. “I _wouldn’t_, and you don’t know me _at all_.”

*

Everyone knows that being a teenage girl and surviving it is like trying to waltz in a minefield. There are always things gone wrong, missing buttons, knotted hair, a blemish that wasn’t there the night before, bullies flushing your notes down the toilet.

Mudblood, Pansy Parkinson whispers, tearing Hermione’s copy of _Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There_ at the spine, and it’s the same year that Hermione learns that there are worse names still. Months before, Gregory Goyle calling her a whore, and later, hidden in the bathroom, Hermione cried so much that even Moaning Myrtle shut up.

Mudblood, and Hermione tilts her chin up and has almost rounded the corner by the time she trips.

She catches a cold once, but whenever she sneezes, she wonders if it’s because someone is badmouthing her anyway.

“Wrackspurts,” is Luna’s solemn diagnosis.

“I thought they made one’s brain fuzzy,” Hermione says dryly.

“Yes, naturally. And then one must sneeze the fuzziness out.”

Later, not having found a tissue, Luna offers Hermione her sleeve to blow her nose into, and Hermione refuses, but, once Luna looks away, she smiles.

The smile isn’t meant to last, of course, because soon someone shoulders Luna out of the way, and someone else calls her ‘Loony Lovegood,’ flashing their teeth like they’re a werewolf, like it’s full moon.

Luna, who Hermione came to like, never safe, barefoot in the grass, curling her socked feet in the corridor, wand behind her ear and Butterbeer-cap necklace jingling as she leans down over books printed right-to-left, bottom-to-top. This strange Devon girl who sees Thestrals, keeps conspiracy theories in her pockets, and doesn’t think clouds a waste of time.

_Look, look, that one there, it looks just like a duck! _

Soon, Luna is sneezing, too, and Hermione knows it’s because they took her shoes.

“It’s a shame they broke my purple quill,” she says once, seated next to Hermione at the Gryffindor table as if houses don’t matter, and maybe they don’t. “I don’t like any other colour half as much.”

The next time someone calls her Loony in the hallway, Hermione sends a stinging hex their way as soon as she’s sure no one’s watching, then three more. She keeps doing it, after, pointing her wand at soft skin where shirt collars peel away, scarves slide down, and sleeves roll up. She never thinks it through, and if that’s what makes her a Gryffindor, so be it.

“You don’t have to do this,” Luna tells her later, waving a hand next to Hermione’s temple as if brushing off some insect only she can see. “I don’t mind when they call me that.”

After that, Hermione doesn’t talk to her for three days, and, dozens of puzzled looks later, Luna grabs her by the sleeve between one class and another, amidst rushing crowds.

“Do you know about moon frogs?” she asks, and Hermione has potions all the way in the dungeons in two minutes, but stops dutifully, anyway.

“There are no frogs on the moon,” she says, hurriedly, but not bothering to free her sleeve. “There’s no air there, or water, or food.”

“Breakfast was hours ago, and you haven’t thought of even one impossible thing yet,” Luna complains, and Hermione stares at her, lessons forgotten. Luna smiles and takes Hermione’s _Through the Looking Glass _out of her bag, retrieved and the spine all fixed.

“Oh, Luna,” Hermione says, and thinks that the world doesn’t deserve her, that she’s too good not just for this Earth but for all the planets put together, too, and then some. “If Crumple-Horned Snorkacks exist, I’m sure you’ll find one.”

Luna smiles, and soon after that, it gets too warm for scarves.

*

Hermione keeps the copy of the Quibbler under her pillow and reads through it when she wakes from nightmares in which Bellatrix is still alive. She writes letters to Luna and tears them to shreds so that she can’t be tempted to post them. She runs out of tea and doesn't buy more.

“You’re on a desert island,” the eagle knocker keeps saying in her kinder dreams, and Hermione is none the wiser even as she frantically reads through her notes, papers tumbling to the ground. “Who do you take with you?”

She knows it’s not Ron, but repeats his name, anyway.

Fleur and Bill send her a postcard from Slovenia – at least _someone_ will – and Hermione reads the words scribbled at the back, one handwriting but a ‘we’ at the beginning of every sentence. She remembers their wedding suddenly, the one good thing, and how there were appetizers and piano pieces and silk ties.

She remembers Luna, too, sunflower in her hair, arms up as she spun slowly in the middle of the crowd, and that small comma of a smile, as if there was some other sentence clause coming. How Hermione would kill to hear it.

She’s so tired of screaming herself awake.

*

Luna’s beetle-wing earring is crushed under the heel of Millicent Bulstrode’s shoe, and Hermione’s there quicker than a blink, the point of her wand digging in too hard where Millicent still has a pulse.

“Guess how many spells I know,” Hermione threatens, and doesn’t use even one, doesn’t have to, Millicent already tripping over her feet as she steps back.

Hermione gathers the remains of the earring in her hand and kisses it before spelling it whole.

*

When Hermione opens the door, Luna’s so close she must have been near kissing it, a stray leaf in her hair and Spectrespecs folded and hooked on the collar of her shirt. She’s wearing a coat, or a bathrobe, or a once-blanket, and she’s staring at Hermione like she hasn’t expected her, which is ironic considering she was just knocking on her door for two minutes straight.

“Hermione,” she says, as if they bumped into each other on the street. “How do you do?”

Hermione stares, and when the silence turns uncomfortable, she fakes a cough just to make a sound. Luna blinks at her, and opens her mouth, no doubt to tell her what mysterious, invisible creatures might be the cause of that, but Hermione is tired of people forgetting her, and won’t have it anymore.

“Scotland, was it?” she says, and tries to not think about how clouds have shapes. “You wrote everyone and their grandmother, everyone but me.”

She knows that she sounds childish, but maybe that’s okay, because she had to grow up too fast, anyway.

“Oh,” Luna says, and then looks down and to the side, cheeks pink. Bashful, almost, only Luna never gets embarrassed, so why– “They were supposed to eat sadness.”

“Excuse me?”

“In Scotland, I was looking for those insects that are supposed to eat sadness and pain. I couldn’t tell you, because you don’t tell people when something is a surprise.”

“You told everyone else,” Hermione reminds her.

“Well, yes, but I wanted to catch them _for you_,” Luna says, and the sky falls. “Only in the end, I didn’t find any.”

Hermione feels her heart swell, and presses her hand over it, because surely, her chest’s too small for this. She feels a familiar sting at the back of her eyes, and it’s all so ridiculous that she can’t help it – she laughs. Luna stares at her, confused, and then smiles.

“I got you tea, instead,” she announces, and it sounds like a happy ending.

“Made of Nargle tears?”

“No,” Luna says, troubled. “Nargles don’t cry. Just raspberry and rosehip.”

When she digs out the bag, it’s so big that Hermione thinks the tea will last to soothe her throat after screaming it raw for months, maybe even years to come.

*

“You’re on a desert island,” the eagle knocker says again. “Who do you take with you?”

Hermione smiles and grips Luna’s hand.

“Never mind desert islands,” Luna says, bringing their hands up to kiss Hermione’s fingers. “I want to go to the moon.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading <333 my tumblr is 'yoyointhegarden' if anyone's interested :)) And here's a link to my original story if anyone wants to have a look: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23463895/chapters/56249917


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